This week's websites range from useful to quirky -- from how to use
your new digital camera to munching on insects instead of exterminating
them.
The Search Is On. Paul Briggs at Search Engines Galore
thought readers of this column would like to know about his site, and I
agree with him. Most of us spend at least part of every session online
trying to find something. How quickly we do that and how successful we
are in coming up with the answers we need depends on how and where we
search. At Search Engines Galore, the main search is much like other
metasearch engines, since it sends your search query through Alta Vista,
Direct Hit, Infoseek, LookSmart, Northern Lights, Yahoo! and WebCrawler.
But where Search Engines Galore excels is in its specialty search
engines -- art, auto, business/finance, genealogy, health, education,
etc. It even has a weather search button and links to kid-safe search
engines.
Valuable for people who want or need to see how different news
outlets treated the same story or who are trying to find all the news on
a certain topic is the Daily News Search. It will let you discover news
from more than 1,500 sources on 200+ subjects that include firearms news
and offbeat news.
There's so much here that you'll need to check out the rest for
yourself. It definitely deserves a bookmark because you'll want to visit
often.
Marxists. It's not what you think. Why A Duck? is a tribute site for fans
of the Marx Brothers. You'll find everything from sound files and screen
shots from their films to an opinion poll and some excellent links.
For Kids. Entertaining and educational are the buzzwords for
good kid-friendly sites and Kids World 2000 certainly
qualifies. Although it does have a few banner ads, they're easy to
ignore. It provides a great jumping-off point for elementary-school kids
to surf the Web because it has links to all kinds of subjects they'll be
interested in. Sports, amusement parks or zoos and aquariums, for
example. Or science and museums around the world.
The Bees' Knees. I suspect kids might find Zachary Huang's Bug-Eating Page more fascinating
than some adults will. A reader who lives in central Washington state
e-mailed me to suggest I visit it. Huang, who's an assistant entomology
professor at Michigan State, has posted pictures of people cooking and
then noshing on giant silkworms, mealworms, hornets, diving beetles,
caterpillars and scorpions. I can imagine the reaction I'd get if I
announced that I was serving silkworm stir-fry for dinner tonight. But
visiting several bug-eating pages (this isn't the only one; see Huang's
links) did remind me of my college days when someone dared me to eat a
chocolate-covered grasshopper. I don't recall what it tasted like (the
crunch was the worst part), but I know I survived.
Play With Your Words. If you like word puzzles -- crosswords,
anagrams, word jumbles and so forth -- Interactive Word Games is for you. It
also features a handy puzzle dictionary.
Create Kitsch. A different kind of playing with words can be
found at PAW, the Pit
of Advertising Wonders. You always thought you could come up with a
better slogan or jingle than you see or hear on TV, right? Well, Clayton
Claymore, one of the creative geniuses for Kranzler Kingsley advertising
agency in Bismarck, N.D., lets you try your hand at them.
Alphabet Soup. If your work brings you into contact with
military or government types, you hear plenty of acronyms, but every
industry and profession has them. And most of us don't want to
appear dumb by asking what in the world does TEOFWAWKI (or even the
common e-mail shorthand, BTW or ROTFL) mean. To the rescue is Acronym Finder, which provides the
translation for 123,300 abbreviations and also has a reverse lookup for
when you know an acronym exists, but you can't remember what it is.
Say Cheese -- Digitally. Here's a free, 12-chapter short
course in digital photography
that will teach you everything you need to know about taking pictures
with the new gadgets, as well as storing the images in your computer.
Famous Folks. What do Charles Lindbergh, Gandhi, Winston
Churchill, Queen Elizabeth II and Ted Turner have in common, besides
being household names? At one time or another, all were named Time
magazine's Man of the Year. At Time's The Past Men of the
Year site, you can read the articles that introduced every honoree
for the past 70 years. It's a fascinating exercise in time travel (no
pun intended). In the 1960s, for instance, Time got cute and chose
"middle Americans," U.S. scientists and 25 and unders as MOY. And then
it's interesting to see who was named, but is no longer remembered --
Teng Hsiao-p'ing, James F. Brynes and Mohammed Mossadegh, for instance.